12 - So Suspect a Heretic, as Surely I Am: New Bearings in North Bavaria (1908)

Summary

IN LATE FEBRUARY 1908 Eisner relished his immediacy in Germany's Catholic South to Karneval, the week-long festival of wanton indulgence preceding Lent. For one long fascinated by the spiritual and psychological affects of holidays, the bacchanalian abandon heralding spring and the rebirth of the natural world spoke to a troubled soul poised to slip the emotional confines of his stagnant marriage. Both the packed schedule of lectures, which Joseph Bloch regarded as suspect, and the effort to broaden the scope of his political pursuits were symptomatic of Eisner's need to redefine and reinvigorate himself by venturing out from his home in Behringersdorf and his office at Luitpoldstraße 9. Direct personal contact with the working-class public, a diversion he savored during Paul Bader's campaign in Marburg fifteen years earlier and for which he carved out time in Berlin, afforded welcome respite and inspiration.

At Vorwärts Eisner wrote an annual observance of the March Revolution of 1848. This year, having had the opportunity to witness the pre-Lenten merriment in Munich, he related the life force of Karneval to revolution itself. “Being loosed from all constraints, leaping exuberantly over all barriers are common to the forceful stirrings of head and heart. Life itself enters into all its power. Nature and natural law triumph. Races such as the French, who engender not only new constitutions, new social order, but new dances as well, who die for freedom with grape leaves in their hair, whose mass will finds joy's rhythm and desire's dynamic in the yearning for freedom, can never be completely oppressed.” On the Saturday and Sunday before Ash Wednesday the citizenry of Bavaria's capital were caught up in the riot of ecstasy, class distinctions obscured by the celebrants’ masks. Awed by the spectacle and its sociological context, Eisner noted particularly the colossal business done by the city's pawnbrokers during the festivities—“What does man need when freedom's intoxication lays hold!”—and the disproportionate number of births each year in November, nine months after the mass “affirmation of life.”